It's literally just a tool. How people use it is up to them and human nature. It's like saying "guns are bad".
I'd argue it's more like 'porn is harmful' or '24/7 news is harmful' or 'fast food is harmful.' It comes down to personal choice in all those issues but, on average and society wide, it's making things worse.
If you have a problem with social media in particular, that's not smart phones. Tiktok isn't smart phones.
Smartphones make all the more accessible, 24/7. Smartphones make the perpetually online life more accessible. There's a lot of overlap between smartphones and social media.
I'd argue it's more like 'porn is harmful' or '24/7 news is harmful' or 'fast food is harmful.' It comes down to personal choice in all those issues but, on average and society wide, it's making things worse.
But instead of saying any of those things, you're attacking the television that allows you to watch them, or the car that drives you to them. See my point? You're not attacking tiktok, you're attacking the smartphone that enables tons of different things, the vast majority of which are beneficial, but one of which is use of tiktok. Similarly, guns are used in beneficial ways 99% of the time, but because of the 1% of the time they are misused, the libs want to ban all guns.
There's overlap. There's the technological smartphone, and the 'societal' smartphone. When talking smartphones, you're not just talking the literal device (which I agree is a freaking marvel), you're talking all that that entails. You're talking universal access to the internet, you're talking constant access to the internet. And you're talking normalization of that constant access. That might be the biggest issue, just moving societal norms in the direction of digital interaction instead of personal interaction. "Smartphone" is almost just shorthand for 'a society where everyone is plugged in every day, and that's the norm.' There's massive implications to the proliferation of an otherwise neutral technology like a smartphone.
I'd argue it's more like 'porn is harmful' or '24/7 news is harmful' or 'fast food is harmful.' It comes down to personal choice in all those issues but, on average and society wide, it's making things worse.
Smartphones make all the more accessible, 24/7. Smartphones make the perpetually online life more accessible. There's a lot of overlap between smartphones and social media.
But instead of saying any of those things, you're attacking the television that allows you to watch them, or the car that drives you to them. See my point? You're not attacking tiktok, you're attacking the smartphone that enables tons of different things, the vast majority of which are beneficial, but one of which is use of tiktok. Similarly, guns are used in beneficial ways 99% of the time, but because of the 1% of the time they are misused, the libs want to ban all guns.
There's overlap. There's the technological smartphone, and the 'societal' smartphone. When talking smartphones, you're not just talking the literal device (which I agree is a freaking marvel), you're talking all that that entails. You're talking universal access to the internet, you're talking constant access to the internet. And you're talking normalization of that constant access. That might be the biggest issue, just moving societal norms in the direction of digital interaction instead of personal interaction. "Smartphone" is almost just shorthand for 'a society where everyone is plugged in every day, and that's the norm.' There's massive implications to the proliferation of an otherwise neutral technology like a smartphone.